El aprendizaje reflexivo 24 

"A World-historical individual is not so unwise as to indulge a variety of wishes to divide his regards. He is devoted to the One Aim, regardless of all else. It is even possible that such men may treat other great, even sacred interests, inconsiderately; conduct which is indeed obnoxious to moral reprehension. But so mighty a form must trample down many an innocent flower—crush to pieces many an object in its path"

—G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of History

"You know, capitalism is above the law/It say 'it don't count less it sells' When it costs too much to build it at home/You just build it cheaper someplace else" —Bob Dylan, Union Sundown

“It turned out that the first big lesson we learned was that there was much, much more business out there in small-town America than anybody, including me, had ever dreamed of.” —Sam Walton, Made in America: My Story

Sam Walton directed the Wal-Mart enterprise into the supercenter of savings. The spread of Wal-Mart Supercenters across the United States attests to the power of the business subject. The urge to save money explains the general allure of discount retail, but too much of a good thing can produce the opposite intended effect. Keynes argues thrift is a paradox. While an individual or household gains realizes benefits of

spending less, the net effect for a national economy can actually be negative. An economic recovery can be deferred when the savings rate improves. The popular belief that the Supercenter offers one low price on all products in one location feeds the growth of this organ of late capitalism. Wal-Mart’s ascent attests to austerity of the Bible Belt, because the firm’s rollback price requires the tighter belt for the ‘lean’ post-Fordist corporate body.

To the business subject Wal-Mart's product selection and low prices explain its distinction as the world’s largest corporation.68 The firm’s dominance in consumer goods and household necessities has made it the corporate leader in the retail discount and the supermarket industries. The people and community found at Walmart structure people’s feelings of affect for the store chain. The store associates and customers build relationships in this new house of worship. The promise of saving offers hope to those who wish to enjoy the goods of royalty on a tight budget, and to those who have fallen from the middle class and no longer belief they will share in the American dream. This belief in the salvation offered by the Supercenter, elicited by what Baudrillard in The Consumer Society calls the profusion or "piling high" of consumer goods into stacks, expresses the magic of consumption, as if the retail patriarch single-handedly gifted it to the laboring masses:

Our markets, major shopping thoroughfares and superstores also mimic a newfound nature of prodigious fecundity. These are our Valleys of Canaan where, in place of milk and honey, streams of neon flow down over ketchup and plastic. But no matter! We find here the fervid hope

that there should be not enough, but too much—and too much for everyone. (26)

For some, gaining a Wal-Mart provides a sign of being a chosen people.69 The partisan worship of the firm speaks to the religious unity of the urge to save and the strategy of savings for the household economy. The low price discount retail provides is rationalized to provide a social service to those on tight budgets with little discretionary income, to the poor and working poor. This belief in the lowest-price for all reinforces the perception that the Supercenter provides a social service to those who need to stretch their shopping dollar even further, to make up for the erosion of value by inflation and the loss of the Fordist wage that accompany the loss of the American standard of living. It were as if those on low income—social assistance, disability, old- age pension, unemployment, welfare, low wage service sector worker—could survive because Wal-Mart lowered its prices on tinned meat, on their behalf no less, as if the firm were in the business of retail to provide a social service for the marginal and vulnerable. While it may make for good public relations, the economically marginalized do not have spending power to pour into Wal-Mart's coffers that would explain its success. In this respect, John McMurtry writes in The Cancer Stage of Capitalism: "The 'freedom of the consumer' in the free market, in other words, is more limited in the freedom it grants than it appears to be. It is, in truth, only the freedom of those who have enough money to demand what they want" (48). This appeal to the undoubtedly real material needs of the poor, cannot alone explain the firm's rise to dominance.

The real source of Wal-Mart's success lies with the comfortable middle-class, the bourgeois or business subject, who possess the discretionary income for consumption, but whom could never save enough. The allure of savings appeals to the middling classes, some of whom see the firm's regime of cost savings as the secret key to living like a millionaire on a middle class income (in America, is not the double household professional income virtually the millionaire lifestyle?); whereas other business subjects, anxious about involuntarily exiting the middle classes, seek the place Walton built, as if saving money at one store were a good substitute for the security afforded by the guarantee of life-employment. This in an age of peace, but also of anxiety and panic over the lost of the American standard of living.

Wal-Mart's surge to dominance in America's competitive discount retailing sector perhaps remains the most visible of developments in the future character of US and global capitalism. In the name of saving the masses—the whole, the totality— their hard earned money, Americans have channeled hundreds of billions of dollars into the hands of one man and his immediate family; in response to bringing consumer democracy to middle America, to save the people from themselves, from government and from labor unions, the American people, in kind, reinstated the sovereign, by making Sam Walton the wealthiest patriarch of America capitalism.

Arguably no single firm could better claim to represent the desire of the whole than the market institution of the Supercenter, a crucial organ of late capitalist markets, which has done more to squeeze savings for the people from their own wallets in their own name; and perhaps no single individual since Ben Franklin has done more to practice the gospel of thrift than Sam Walton, not simply by praising its virtue, but by

endeavouring to transform as much of the US economy as possible to reflect the image of thrift. His brand of frugal austerity develops upon the asceticism of not only the US East, but also the ancient East. In the conservative right, after all, savings is the conservation of wealth, and the impulse to save can do no wrong. In the name of the West's consumer democracy, a strong-arm corporate leader, who forms the inverse of the projected image of the Asiatic despot, built the Superstore system:

It is that confinement of the revenues that feed them, to one or a few hands, which makes such undertakings possible. This power of Asiatic and Egyptian kings, of Etruscan theocrats, etc. has in modern society been transferred to the capitalist, whether he appears as an isolated individual or, as in the case of joint-stock companies, in combination with others. (Marx, Capital 452)

A warlord of the South combating the tendency of rising prices, Sam Walton is the leading patriarch of America's culture of austerity. In the struggle to combat the model of industrial democracy of the North and the governmentality it stood for, Walmart uses government to suit its needs. On its surface the Supercenter appears to be nothing but a relic of earlier capitalist forms, as with the general and department store, representing an old, time-tested strategy of accumulation.70 In this regard, discount retail invokes the popular image of a trickster salesmen hawking cheaply made products no one actually needs, which hardly inspires belief that the Supercenter is derived from the future of capitalist exchange. Yet the dedication of the masses to making Walton the richest patriarch means that the Superstore, no matter what

reactions it inspires, remains an organized force of the masses that identify with this retail patriarch and remain generally indifferent to his iron-fist.

Sam Walton founded his retail empire on the rollback price. The business plan of the Wal-Mart Supercenter system derives from the strategy of reinvesting marginal cost savings into the means of production. Yet in this regard the firm does not actually produce per se, but produces surplus value by means of commodity exchange carried out by a sophisticated computer network directing the distribution system. The mode of commodity exchange engages the indifferent drive of the consuming masses to save, and in this regard the Superstore's appeal is rooted in the seemingly innocent virtue of thrift.

Chairman Walton

The Ozarks Mountains actually form a high-altitude plateau in Northwest Arkansas. They were settled by English, Scotch and Irish Protestants and Germans in the 18th century seeking land for the life of a petty producer and the promise of self- determination made possible by economic independence (Moreton, Came 61). Bringing low priced household goods and discount consumer items, by then already bountiful in urban city centres, Sam Walton began his retail empire by servicing neglected markets in relatively isolated rural townships in the poor rural American South. In his memoirs, Walton writes:

When people want to simplify the Wal-Mart story, that's usually how they sum up the secret of our success: "Oh, they went into small towns when nobody else would." And a long time ago, when we were first

being noticed, a lot of folks in the industry wrote us off as a bunch of country hicks who had stumbled onto this idea by a big accident. Maybe it was an accident, but that strategy wouldn't have worked at all if we hadn't come up with a method for implementing it. That method was to saturate a market area by spreading out, then filling in. […] we saturated northwest Arkansas. We saturated Oklahoma. We saturated Missouri. (109-110)

This locale of the American South, associated with the image of economic scarcity and lack, provided the market need from which the Supercenter was derived. From the time of the 1949 Chinese Communist Revolution to America's escalation of the Vietnam War, Walton assembled a chain of sixteen Ben Franklin Five & Dime discount stores, in Arkansas, Missouri and Kansas, before launching his first Wal-Mart in 1962. Much like the Jianxi mountains were the haven for Mao Tse-Tung and the Red Army from which to emerge, Sam Walton' descent from the Ozarks into middle America to Rollback the price on American labor altered the landscape of the US heartland:

Being the pioneers, Wal-Mart leaders must blaze trails into uncharted lands. One example of their competitive innovation is a new concept store called the neighborhood Market. Says retail analyst Burt Flickinger, 'Wal-Mart's strategy is very similar to Mao Zedong's. Conquer the countryside first and take the cities second. (Bergdahl 6)

Thousands of Wal-Mart Supercenters have reshaped the face of urban development. By the mid 1980s, well after launching his retail revolution, Chairman Walton would

ascent to the apex of the US corporate summit, to claim the title as America's wealthiest individual, in Forbes magazine Fortune five hundred list (1985-8). By the end of his career, in 1992 Walton was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by then President George H. W. Bush. That same year he was also honoured by the Communist Party of China in the Jiangsu province, granted a Gold Star for assisting the Republic in building the people's factories in the Suzhou area. In the United States, Walton received state recognition for his business excellence. His leadership on cost savings served as a bright beacon of hope for the age of the corporate dismantling of the government regulation of the nation's postwar golden age. In China, the patriarch of America's retail revolution was saluted for persuading American corporate firms to relocate and for serving the cause of building an international supply chain of imperial capital. Walton fought organized labor at home, on behalf of the American consumer, and built the capitalist base of the communist party in China, after briefly trying—and failing—to convince the public to buy American in Wal-Mart's advertising makeover during the mid-eighties (Ortega 257).

In the conservative right, the business subject's desire for the ideal of economic masterlessness explains Sam Walton's singular drive to build his retail empire. The patriarchal head-face of the Supercenter is praised for his welfare vision and denounced by critics for undermining the spirit of free enterprise. The discipline of thrift guided the formation of this corporate patriarch, a business subject intolerant of ideological dissent, in the last instance signified by the resistance of organized labor. In running his empire, Walton, who often visited his stores to personally greet his associates, could be said to exhibit domineering traits of the Asiatic despot at the head

of his corporate family. As corporate head of Wal-Mart enterprises, Walton publicly espoused the rhetoric of popular democracy, claiming to value the services of his people, called store associates, inspiring those who knew his virtues, as if they were actually members of the same corporate family; yet, at home, he privileged his family, inspired by the royal 'we', by making them business partners and involving them in making business decisions. His in store presence to directly appeal to his associates to resist the impulse for greater autonomy—as signified by the threat of unionization— was his signature totalitarian gesture. His vision of austerity guiding the corporation reinstates the collective reality principle of the conservative right: that wealth is earned from the discipline of savings. True to his word, Walton accumulated unprecedented amounts of private wealth.

"In Those Oklahoma Hills Where I was Born..."

Born in Oklahoma and a child of the Great Depression, accompanying his father on property foreclosures appears to have only augmented Walton's drive to master the law of value. On these journeys on family business, the economic scarcity he witnessed only reinforced the need to save. The image of loss instilled in Walton a deep reluctance to ever lack. Even while a multi-billionaire, the premise of lack did not subside. The evident lack rendered by market price deflation, what Twentieth century economist Joseph Schumpeter calls capitalism’s “creative destruction,” in the worst economic contraction of the Twentieth century (perhaps ever), provided the ideal social environment for this patriarch of capitalism's development.71 The suffering and hardship inspired his belief in the need for permanent austerity in his retail

revolution. Walton's unyielding thrift-obsession, a collective reactive-formation, formed from the childhood trauma of lack, was retained even while he was filthy rich. Achieving market dominance did not change the firm's culture of thrift, explained by the legend of Sam Walton, who drove the same beat-up Ford pickup truck, lived in a modest house, and reveled in his own thrift, despite having the highest net-worth of any retail corporate sovereign: "The family of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton has a combined fortune estimated to be about $90 billion. In 2005, Bill Gates was worth $46 billion; Warren Buffet, $44 billion" (Reich 113).72 No doubt the drive of ambition, but also the paranoia of loss and the fear of annihilation, explains this collective drive to worship this lord-master of the business subject.

Wal-Mart's culture of thrift and its work ethic communicate the philosophy guiding its corporate operations. The mythologization of Sam Walton's values, his thrift philosophy, provides the firm with the ideological program to justify its mode of exchange and to defend against the social costs of its operations in the public imagination. Sam Walton's Supercenters attest to this patriarch's dedication to making the public feel rich by saving them money. Walton waged a relentless campaign on rising prices, and his stores bring consumerism to the masses on the promise of the lowest price. Supercenters are the modern cathedrals of consumerism. The biggest provide two hundred and fifty thousand square feet of retail space to worship the American patriarch of plenitude and to praise his thrifty spirit. The Supercenter's wide appeal suggests Wal-Mart is the capitalist form of the future, an organ of late capital designed to deflate prices, in the systematic struggle to thwart the crisis of overproduction, by suppressing the rising cost of labor, with the consent of the

indifferent masses. Arguably no single firm has done more to combat the rising price on the categories of consumer goods and household items than Wal-Mart. This corporate body enjoys the trade advantages of its gigantic scale, and its vanguard role in the retail sector ensures it sets the rules of the service-sector game.

The mythology of Sam Walton legitimizes his retail revolution. Discursively reproduced afterwards by Wal-Mart, Walton's thrift philosophy communicates his vision on behalf of the organization he no longer commands. Walton reasoned he was no more than an independent businessman, going so far as to argue that his retail chain consisted of independent stores that did not constitute a company. The small minded businessman retained control over the head of the trans-national corporation, with the savings generated by the business perpetually reinvested into its operations, never to be wasted on the frills of excess.

The Lowest-Price-for-All

The Wal-Mart Rollback price draws on the customer's belief in not just the lowest price, but also the right to it, as if there were no limit to how low it may go. The